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November 22, 2011

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Part of Mitt Romney’s political persona is his perfect family: His oft-mentioned marriage of 40 years, his five handsome, successful sons and their photogenic families. Like much with Romney, it’s an asset that is on the edge of being a liability: The family has a Stepford quality that makes him all the harder to identify with.

But the Romney family Thanksgiving dinner may be a bit more interesting, complicated, and typically American than that image projects. A little-noticed new biography of Romney by Ronald B. Scott, a staff writer for Time, Inc. magazines in the 1970s who is a Mormon and a distant cousin of the candidate, offers new details about Romney’s family.

Romney’s family, Scott writes, includes a sibling whose potential to steal the show has Romney’s circle on edge. It also includes the utterly typical American phenomenon of divorce – though one that’s far less common in the Mormon Church.

“Between now and November 2012, one or more [Romney relative] will come rattling out of the family closet to entertain and add goofy humanity to a clan that, superficially, seems too squeaky clean, fiercely upright, and annoyingly wholesome to be true,” Scott writes, adding the worries of a Romney friend: There are “loose cannons all over the deck.”

The loosest cannon, by Scott’s telling, is Romney’s eldest sister Jane, an actress who lives in Los Angeles.

“Insiders have come to refer to [Jane Romney] as the Billy Carter of the Romney family,” he writes.

Romney’s sister openly backed Barbara Boxer and campaigned for Jerry Brown in her Mormon community, and is eager to have a visible role on her brother’s campaign which, in turn, is eager to keep her busy and out of trouble.

Jane Romney had a “very acrimonious divorce” from a nephew of church President Gordon Hinckley, Scott writes.

The older brother and heir apparent to their father, former Gov. Geore Romney, is George Scott Romney. He has been divorced twice, Scott writes; one of his ex-wives ran for Senate in Michigan using the Romney name. He backed her opponent.

The timing of George Romney’s second marriage and the birth of the first child in that marriage, Scott writes, was a religious transgression that resulted in an official, if temporary, separation (excommunication or disfellowship) from the church.”

Scott’s book, which is not a page-turner and has gotten only a handful of reviews, also offers glimpses of the internal politics of the Boston-area church over which Romney presided. He clashed in particular with Judy Dushku, a Mormon feminist figure and the mother of actress Eliza Dushku. After a bitter exchange during his 2002 race for governor – in which she was among those suggesting he was privately more conservative than he made public – local leaders redrew the map of “wards” – the equivalent of parishes – to ensure the Romneys and Dushkus would no longer meet, drawing Dushku’s Watertown home into a suburban ward.

“To some, this dextrous and nearly transparent maneuverer became known as the Dushku gerrymander, an unrequested courtesy extended to their former stake president Mitt Romney and his wife, who would never again have to be face to face with Judy Dushku while they worshipped,” he said.

The book also offers a glimpse into Romney’s complicated pro-life politics. The candidate has said that he came to oppose abortion after discussing stem cell research with a Harvard scientist in 2004.

But Scott reports that Romney’s views have also been informed by the fact that three of his sons used in vitro fertilization (IVF), and one used a surrogate mother, even though the practice is “strongly discouraged” in their own church and occasionally triggers disciplinary actions.”

Romney has never publicly opposed in vitro fertilization, which draws objections only from part of the anti-abortion movement. Pro-life objections to the practice, though, center of the destruction of excess embryos; and the practice is difficult to square with Romney’s stated view that life begins at conception and his stated opposition to “Plan B” contraceptives, which raise similar concerns in parts of the anti-abortion movement.

“Their family, friends, and fellow church members seem well aware that three of the sons have wrestled with fertility issues in their own families and, to help things along, have sought solutions that are seemingly inconsistent with their father’s views on abortion and stem cell research,” Scott writes.

Romney’s longtime, Eric Fehrnstrom, declined to comment on the book, and didn’t respond to a question about the accuracy of its contents. The campaign, Scott writes, met with him and refused to cooperate. Fehrnstrom, he said, told him that cooperation "would imply their endorsement of the contents of the book." Fehrnstrom also declined to comment on Romney’s views on in vitro fertilization.

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